This novel is slow to start and the story begins with a group of students entering a cave. Many of the characters at this point in the story disappear and the reader is left wondering whether they would reappear – they don’t. There were pages and pages of medical and historical information that often seemed to have very little relevance to the rest of the chapter. Although the author did occasionally attempt to link this information to the general plotline it felt too much like padding to me. I even found much of the information interesting enough to read but the book could have lost most of it as it slowed things down too much and parts of it did drag sometimes. It may have been better to have the characters introduce bits of this medicine or history through their conversations but 80 to 90% could be lost without affecting the tale that Brandt wished to tell. And that tale was both intriguing and exciting once the archaeological dig in Iraq gets going. That is not to say that the back story for each character is un-interesting because I found each of them likeable and real, particularly Halfus, Rich and Wendy.

There is suspense and surprise aplenty, with the required twists and turns in a story involving a dangerous virus, in the second half of the book. This could almost have redeemed the novel for me when weighed against the “info-dumped” sections had it not been for too many errors that jumped out at me. At one point the author states that “the deadliest pandemic of today is HIV/AIDS…” but then contradicts this with “terrible as HIV/AIDS is, however, it is not the deadliest pandemic of the modern era…” in the next paragraph! There is a section later when Wendy finds her mother’s curtains closed to be surprising, when on a previous page she finds those same curtains open or closed to be predictive of her mother’s mood. Maybe it was the way it was written but it came across as another contradiction. And there were “gender changes”, often within the same sentence, that should have been edited out. Truman, Wendy’s mother’s cat, was referred to as he, she, him, her and he again all within the same paragraph. Later Wendy states “…my father always blamed herself for…” which was so obvious.

For me such errors almost undo the generally well-written qualities an author strives to achieve in their literary creation and, fortunately, I still ended up liking Plagued With Guilt. It is an exciting, informative, even portentous, book but with the breathless thriller element somewhat diminished. I was given a copy of the book in return for an honest and objective review.